Sorry for the Group Email

We had met Pau, our Cambodian tuk-tuk driver, as soon as we’d stepped off the bus in Siem Reap, and had made honest plans to call him. We slept in the next morning and, once we’d gone through a few rounds of toast and jam (the Red Lodge includes as much of this as you can eat with your room rate), went and called him.

When he turned up, he apologised for being late. “I come here to wait for you from seven till ten. Then I go home for lunch.”

Even though we hadn’t asked him to, the fact that he’d waited for three hours in the morning sun made us feel horribly guilty. Maybe that was part of the bargaining process.

In any event, we were in the back of his tuk-tuk (in real life, a covered, brightly-decorated trailer hitched to the back of a scooter) and off to Angkor Wat.

In fact, Angkor Wat is the largest of around 80 temples, most of which are more interesting and less crowded than the temple for which the entire site is named.

A day at the temples is much like a day at the Science Museum. The first four hours is spent in wide-eyed wonder, prodding at the buttons and marvelling at humankind’s extraordinary progression. Angkor Wat’s temples fit the description perfectly. At a time in which Europe was living in mud huts and considering itself lucky if it managed to avoid cholera, the Cambodians were busy creating one of the finest architectural masterpieces on earth. The scale of the temples is legendary, the carvings in the wall are intricate and in some cases, exist on a truly vast scale. They make the Sagrada Familiar look like an ambitious Duplo project.

For the most part the temples are quietly, gloriously unpatrolled. You can climb all over the architecture, and go into the temples at will. If the complex existed in Europe it would be 25 yards behind a security cordon, and any attempt to go beyond it would be greeted with howling alarms, the heavy footfall of security guards and tea and biscuits with the head of security, who would patiently explain that the rope was there for a reason and you would never be welcome back.

(I speak with some experience on this subject. My father is a veteran of setting alarms off in museums.)

Instead, at Angkor, you can scramble all over the buildings. You can spend hours in the sunny courtyards and then sit quietly in the shade of an ancient temple, watching the occasional other tourists come and go. And, when you’re alone (which is much of the time), you feel like a bona fide Tomb Raider-esque explorer. (Indeed, the Tomb Raider movie was filmed in Siem Reap. There’s even a restuarant named after Ms. Jolie to commemorate it. And a cocktail to boot.)

But, like that child in the Science Museum, after a few hours the troubling thought occurs: “Phew, not more temples.” I’m sure there are tourists in the world who are much better than we, and who can spend days clambering over the ruins in a state of almost priapic excitement, but by the middle of the afternoon we were exhausted. All those steps are exhausting, and the temperature didn’t drop significantly from the high-thirties until the sun went down. The sweat dripped from us torrentially.

Adding to the exhaustion was the fact that the temples are next to impossible to photograph properly. Paying any attention to a camera’s automatic meter results in a series of horribly over-exposed images. The temples themselves are very dark; the sky against which they are silhouetted exceptionally bright. Exposing for the sky results in a picture of a particularly interesting but not terribly-clear shadow. Exposing for the temples frequently results in an image that makes it look like you visited Angkor Wat on the same day the temples were the subject of a brutal nuclear attack.

We ended the first day at the temple of Bayon. There are two interesting things about this temple. Firstly (and this won’t be interesting to you), I know someone called Bayon. He’s a champion drinker and, if he ever gets bored of the UK, he should move to Cambodia to see if his fortunate surname gets him anywhere with the locals. He’s got a beer named after him, so I suspect it would.

Secondly, the temple is incredible. Everywhere we looked there was an enigmatic Buddha facing us. It was a huge, awesome sight, and we even managed to forget that our clothes were sticking to us for a spell.

Still, by the end of that first day we were broken.

The second day we met Pau at ten in the morning. Actually we met him at nine, as we were coming back from a trip to one of Siem Reap’s many horrifically-overpriced supermarkets. Pau was an early bird, it seemed, or maybe he was just afraid we’d get a better offer from another tuk-tuk driver and go with them.

We’d arranged an earlier start with Pau because we fancied arriving at the temples while it was still cool. The problem is, of course, that Cambodia gets fantastically hot as soon as it gets light (it never really cools down at night, either), and so by the time we arrived at our first temple we were already sweating. The only good thing about being sweaty is that once you are it, you come to terms with it. I am Dave, my shirt is dark red and sticking to me.

Day two was at least spent at a more leisurely pace. We stuck to the shade and spent a lot of time sitting down, despite that making us targets for the persistent children, who spend their days selling postcards and trinkets. They can be hard to resist: firstly they are incredibly persistent; secondly they are adorable. I see why so many Americans take to adopting them. Their tactics are clever and numerous. One counted to ten in five languages to try to convince us to get postcards. Another girl said, “what is the capital of Madagascar?”

We didn’t know, we apologised.

“You buy some bracelets, I tell you.”

It was genius.

We ended the day barely any earlier than we’d ended the first. The sweat stung our eyes and our feet dragged. The worst feeling, though, was that we’d spent two days killing ourselves, and had barely scratched the surface of the temples.

The third day began even earlier. We woke up at 4.30am, the better to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat.

Unfortunately, a few thousand other people had had the same idea, and by the time we arrived the air was rich with the sound of a thousand cracking shutters. Mendy found a beautiful perch in front of Angkor Wat’s lake, only for the view to be shattered by a bus load of white-haired tourists who had brought their own plastic seats. Still, the best time to photograph any of Angkor’s temples is either when the sun is coming up or going down, so we made the most of it.

We wandered off into Angkor itself. We sat for an hour as the sun became brighter and hotter, then wandered back to find Pau. As we did, we were delighted to find monkeys. In anticipation of this, Mendy had brought bananas, which we handed out to those monkeys brave enough to come within reach of us.

The rest of our day with Pau was spent at Banteay Srei, a distant temple. At around 30km from Siem Reap, we expected it to be all-but deserted, but when we arrived, at all of eight in the morning, we had already been bested by a handful of tuk-tuks and two tour coaches.

We shrugged and went for an explore. Then (this quickly established itself as our favourite thing to do at temples) we found a shady spot and sat down for a bit.

On the way back to town we stopped at Cambodia’s landmine museum. Cambodia’s landmine problem is immense. Hundreds of people are hospitalised or killed per year because of unmarked landmines, and the museum is a testimony to the work of a fairly bizarre-sounding man called Aki Ra, who spent his childhood as a soldier with the Khmer Rouge, and his adulthood single-handedly cleaning up the mines laid by the same. The work is, as you’d expect, more than a little dangerous. But the enduring problem with landmines is that they are literally indiscriminate. As Jody Williams, founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, said, “the landmine is eternally prepared to take victims. It is the perfect soldier.” It’s as possible that as many as ten million landmines were dropped across Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge. The other enduring problem is that the landmine is the only battlefield weapon not designed to kill outright. An injured soldier is more of a drain on battlefield resources than a dead one, after all, and so it has come to pass that a generation of Cambodian children is growing up as amputees. Siem Reap itself is full of beggars with mutilated bodies; arms and legs missing and, in some cases, faces burnt beyond human recognition. Part of the museum’s remit is the ongoing campaign against landmines. There are just 13 countries in the world that continue to produce landmines, nine of which are in Asia. Of the rest, just one is European (Russia), one is middle-Eastern (Iran), and two are north American (Cuba and the United States).

Dave strives not to step on alien-looking bits of metal. Click here to see the rest of the Cambodia pictures on Flickr.